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This is one place where I think information overload is fine. No, I can’t keep up with it all. But a lot of times when I flip over to CNN , I am simply not interested in the main story – but want to get an overall view of the news.

When I’m connected, I’ll just use the web – and read only the articles I’m interested in.

The news crawl is also acutely useful for a muted TV…

I never watch CNN . I prefer their website.

I like the crawl. I agree with Chad – normally don’t pay any attention to the main story because they are often much too long for the topic at hand.

Now can we please the crazy fly graphics, loopy sound effects, and the insane need to brand every crisis it’s own name and theme music? CNN /Time have done a nice job of cleaning up their web sites. I hope they go further with the network. Until then, I will continue to lock myself out with parental controls.

That’s HD broadcast, they’re probably planning more interactive content on it so they cleaned up the UI.

Finally! The crawl was introduced and was valuable during major events like 9/11, the Election, etc. It’s not needed for everyday ‘average’ news.

I am in favor of it during major events. Perhaps a more functional use is to have it run during commercials so it provides value for viewers when they monetize their content.

The newer screen (as posted here), I love the “tagged” look of updates with the background color on it.

While I am excited about the changes, it won’t coerce me to go back to mainstream media. It is a good change, nonetheless. :)

~Joe

I think the comments so far don’t understand what’s really going on here. There’s still a news feed at the bottom, but it has a rotating list of static, full headlines rather than a marquee. It’s much easier to read and less distracting.

Glad to see it!

With the scrolling, you have to sit there and wait, and wait, and wait to read any of the headlines, distracting you from the main broadcast. One complete headline at a time is much easier to deal with. (Plus you don’t see any half headlines which looked interesting, but which make you wait for the whole cycle to repeat to see it all.)

I don’t get news from TV or Cable, it is tainted.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfdmpv48Rwo&feature=related

Let my praise, of course, be tempered by the fact that (oh yeah) I never watch cable news at home, so the impact to my daily life is minimal here. The only time I see it is when I’m out somewhere, maybe stopping to eat lunch, and it’s on a TV in the place.

I generally prefer to get news from the web or NPR in the car on the way to/from work.

I do know what’s going on. They’ve replaced short news snippets with headlines. While I still end up with a vague idea of what’s going on, I actually have to keep listening (and hope they talk about it) or go to CNN .com for more.

I think that with HD they could have a static headline and smaller, static summary. If the text is too small for some people to read on some screens, then fine – at least it’s out of the way.

I am simply not interested in the main story – but want to get an overall view of the news.

Often there isn’t one. So you’re just left watching Wolf Blitzer’s TV on your TV.

This is usually when Wolf starts madly switching between ‘situations’ and repeating words like ‘focused’, ‘developing’ and ‘unprecedented’ in an attempt to fool you.

A lot of times, when you think you’re multi-tasking, you’re just switching your attention between one or two or three things

This sounds a lot like computing/programming paradigms. Malcolm Gladwell might argue that ‘attention’ in glimpse form is sufficient.

Also, the cynical side of me can’t help wondering if someone somewhere decided that removing the extra bars (or sticking with a centralzied static bar) might be particularly useful for shows hosted by attractive women with relatively open shirts.

FWIW , right now on my TV CNN has a weather bar and some sort of satellite weather sidebar I believe, so that the ‘main’ screen is only about 3/4 of the overall TV.

It’s not tied to the story on air. It’s just a format other than scrolling news that CNN International had since 2006.

I’ll be the first to say it. Is there any value to actually seeing much of the talking heads? I think clear organization is great. Scrolling tickers bad. I say that the “main” video can go even smaller. The saved space can go for clean, efficient presentation of more news in visual form. A photo “ticker” too.

I was watching Bloomberg the other morning and they are just out of control with the tickers on the screen, i swear there was like 6 or 7 levels of them. I can’t imagine anyone in their right mind watching those hoping to see a symbol from their portfolio. It would be absolute torture.

It really is a breath of fresh air to NOT have the crawl going across the bottom. Even if they did something where the text disolved between other single line text items that would be better than the crawl in my opinion.

Remember when Lewis Black made them turn off the crawl when he was interviewed on Larry King? They actually did! And then they would put it back up when he wasn’t looking. So great:

http://onegoodmovemedia.org/movies/0612/lk120106lewisblackscroll.mov

I’m not sure if this is their intention, but a nice side-effect of removing the crawl is that it will actually grab your attention if they feel the need to temporarily bring it back for an important news event.

They ditched the crawl on CNN International at least 2 years ago. I love the way it looks. Though, not always the static text is related to the story being told.

I found this distracting, but the problem’s already been solved for me. Rather than wait for CNN to stop sucking (and it still sucks profusely in other ways) I’ve been getting my news elsewhere.

I didn’t mind the crawl too much, but I won’t particularly miss it either. I’m glad the Dow Jones graphic isn’t there 24/7 too.

In the past, I would sometimes catch just a piece of info from the crawl, but not all of it. Rather than wait for CNN to repeat it, I’d go to the website in the hope that they’d have the crawl info there somewhere. I could never find it. Did that ever exist?

I know, at least in recent weeks, CNN had resorted to crawling user comments from the internet. As if the internet wasn’t a big enough forum for anonymous idiots, they were showing it on TV too. I’ve seen ESPN do this as well. I, for one, welcome this change.

I can’t even see that stuff at the bottom. It’s invisible to me.

My wife on the other hand – that’s all she looks at.